Yoast SEO

Description

Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin

Need some help with your search engine optimization? Need an SEO plugin that helps you reach for the stars? Yoast SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. It is the favorite tool of millions of users, ranging from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet. With Yoast SEO, you get a solid toolset that helps you aim for that number one spot in the search results. Yoast: SEO for everyone.

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. How? Below you’ll find a small sampling of the powers of Yoast SEO:

Taking care of your WordPress SEO

The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.

Full control over site breadcrumbs: add a piece of code and you’re good to go.

Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Never have to worry about Google penalties again.

Title and meta description templating for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.

Premium support

The Yoast team does not always provide active support for the Yoast SEO plugin on the WordPress.org forums, as we prioritize our email support. One-on-one email support is available to people who bought Yoast SEO Premium only.

Note that the Yoast SEO Premium also has several extra features too, including the option to have multiple focus keywords, internal linking suggestions, cornerstone content checks and a redirect manager, so it is well worth your investment!

You should also check out the Yoast Local SEO, Yoast News SEO and Yoast Video SEO extensions to Yoast SEO. They work with the free version of Yoast SEO already, and these premium extensions of course come with support too.

Bug reports

Bug reports for Yoast SEO are welcomed on GitHub. Please note GitHub is not a support forum, and issues that aren’t properly qualified as bugs will be closed.

FAQ

Reviews

I’m not even always 100% sure what it’s doing but the way it integrates and makes sure that I fill in all my SEO stuff… It’s gotta be 5 stars. Maybe one day I’ll really dig in and learn all the ins and outs of it 🙂

Interested in development?

Changelog

8.0.0

Release Date: August 14th, 2018

Enhancements:
* Implements the Yoast sidebar for Gutenberg: added the Readability, Focus Keyword and Cornerstone content tabs to the sidebar.
* Revamps the Yoast metabox to use the same vertical design as the new sidebar.
* Implements the same tabbed layout in the plugin’s network settings screen that is also used in the plugin’s site settings screens.
* Implements a plugin-specific network settings API and use it in the network settings screen.
* Introduces a network admin-specific admin bar menu.
* Adds notifications to the Notification Center in regards to Gutenberg compatibility. If Gutenberg is older than the minimum supported version by Yoast SEO, a ‘problem’ notification is added. If Gutenberg is only slightly outdated, a ‘normal’ notification is added.
* Implements the automatic detection of the keyword for terms based on the term’s title.

Bugfixes:
* Fixes a bug where /sitemap.xml would not correctly redirect to /sitemap_index.xml in some environments.
* Fixes a bug where sitemap cache transients would not be correctly cleared.
* Fixes a bug where markers were wrongfully displayed in Gutenberg.
* Fixes a bug where SEO titles were incorrectly evaluated as being of a good length when they were actually slightly too long.

Other:
* Moves the network’s Restore Site functionality into its own tab.

7.9.1

Release Date: August 7th, 2018

Enhancements:
* Improves the link to claim your website on Pinterest by directly sending you to the right location.
* Adds the passive voice assessment for Dutch.
* Adds a link to a relevant article about re-using keywords to the feedback of the assessment that checks if the keyword was used previously.

Bugfixes:
* Adds a missing H1 heading to the Network Admin > SEO > Edit Files page.
* Fixes the textarea sizes in the Search Appearance > RSS tab.
* Fixes a bug where adding a company image in step 4 of the Configuration Wizard, would make the wizard crash.
* Fixes a bug where PHP error notices were given when the search result doesn’t have any WooCommerce products. Props to jaska120.
* Improves the order in which assessments are triggered. The keyword in the title is only checked once there’s a title, the keyword in the introduction is only checked once there’s a text, and the keyword in the meta description is only checked once there’s a meta description.
* Fixes a bug that caused keywords to be incorrectly recognized within possessive forms (e.g. Natalia in Natalia's fix).
* Improves the recognition of keywords with special diacritics in the URL.
* Improves keyword recognition through adding Spanish inverted exclamation and question marks to the rules that determine word boundaries.

7.9.0

Release Date: July 24th, 2018

Enhancements:
* Introduces the collapsible sections to all the tabs in Search Appearance.
* Improves accessibility of the collapsible sections in Search Appearance.

Bugfixes:
* Fixes a bug where archive settings for post types aren’t shown on the search appearance page when the has_archive for that post type contains an archive slug. Props to nesinervink, schurig.
* Fixes a bug where a notice (“Notice: Trying to get property of non-object”) is given when the $term->taxonomy isn’t set before it is used. Props to bainternet.
* Fixes a bug where an uppercased encode URI isn’t redirected to the category. Props to dawnbirth.
* Fixes a bug where HTML entities were not always decoded in the Snippet Variables.
* Fixes a bug where custom field labels would be separated by spaces in the classic editor, but in Gutenberg they would be separated by underscores instead.
* Fixes a bug where the conversion of ', which is PHP’s HTML entity for the apostrophy, did not happen.
* Fixes a bug where the same notification is shown multiple times when trashing multiple posts.
* Fixes a bug where a possibly non-existent key would be retrieved when generating the article:section OpenGraph tag. Props to mikeschinkel.
* Fixes a bug in the UI that happend when do_shortcode was run on category descriptions in the admin list. Additionally, fixes rendering of shortcodes in category descriptions on the frontend.
* Fixes a bug where saved templates in Search Appearance would be saved incorrectly into the database, resulting in them never being loaded when editing a post, page, etc. This meant that the default template would always be used.
* Fixes a bug where the “Tagline” / %%sitedesc%% snippet editor variable was not selectable in the Search Appearance settings.
* Fixes a bug where the newsletter signup in the configuration wizard would not work.

Other:
* Moves some snippet variables to only appear within specific editors. Adds a filter wpseo_editor_specific_replace_vars to make this pluggable.
* Adds the white background to the template of media on the Search Appearance page.
* Changes feedback in the keyword density assessment to make it more explicit that synonyms are not taken into consideration when calculating the score.
* Shows a notification with the message that you should check your post type archive settings when these are possibly reset to their defaults in 7.7 or 7.8.

Earlier versions

For the changelog of earlier versions, please refer to https://yoa.st/yoast-seo-changelog